AMD have announced that their Q3 2015 period saw a $197 million net loss, and an operating loss of $158 million. The comparison of revenue loss between this time last year and now doesn’t look so good on paper either, it was $1.43 million at this point in 2014 while right now it’s $1.06 billion.

While this is the fourth straight quarterly loss for AMD, they do point out that the quarterly revenue has increased 13% between Q2 and Q3. There’s also a good reason for the figures being so low as well.

Recently the company lowered the prices of their older model GPUs to make room for all the new R5, R7 and R9 cards, which resulted in a write-down of around $65 million inventory. Thankfully the new cards are selling well enough that the graphics segment of the pie to be up 12% quarter-on-quarter.

Talking on the latest figures, Dr. Lisa Su (AMD president and chief executive) had this to say:

“AMD delivered double-digit percentage sequential revenue growth in both of our segments in the third quarter. We continue to take targeted actions to improve long-term financial performance, build great products and simplify our business model. The formation of a joint venture of our back-end manufacturing assets is a significant step towards achieving these goals and strengthening our balance sheet.”

A post that isn’t a review? Yep, time for a good old fashioned opinion piece, allow me to go all White Goodman on you fine readers and hit you with some knowledge.
OK that sounded stupid. (just a little 😛 ~Lone)

A thought struck me recently: Why do we get so up in arms about sequels? In fact not just sequels; remakes, reboots and franchising in general.
Immediate Answer: Well we as fans of entertainment, don’t like to think of our favourite films/characters/heroes/intellectual properties being used solely for profit. We want new and original content and not just the same things rehashed and reused every so often.

OK, that’s fair enough. New ideas should be sought after and praised, of course they should. Humanity probably wouldn’t have gotten very far if we didn’t take advantage of new and exciting ideas (Christ knows where we’d be if the wheel hadn’t caught on), and don’t get me wrong, I am all for new ideas in films and entertainment but if I like that new idea why is it so bad that I want more? I’m always the first to ask for seconds and thirds at the dinner table when pasta is being served.

This train of thought really struck me when I saw a news article about Disney and how they’re going to extend the life of the Frozen Brand (Yes I know it’s a giant film and you probably can’t escape it, yes I know Let It Go is everyone’s favourite song right now, yes I can understand how so many people find the film overrated, just hear me out). The comments on the link to the article were what you’d expect,

“They’re just trying to make as much money as possible”

“Why can’t they come up with anything original?”

“Frozen was overrated anyway”

“Hey everyone, lets all just Let It Go”

Yet all I could find myself thinking was,  “You’re all surprised? This is Disney we’re talking about”
This is the company that bought Marvel because they were raking in so much dough with all of their really, really good adaptations of their superheroes and we’re all surprised that they want to make more money of their most successful animated film ever? But I’m not here to talk about Frozen, not when I already did for my dissertation, (it made me enjoy the film even more).

Look I believe you can make a good film out of anything, if that means I get to return to Arendelle or fight some more Xenos then sweet, bring it on says I.  BUT, having said that, I can completely understand why sequels/remakes etc etc are frowned upon. We all know why, say it with me everyone, “They’re never as good as the original”

Now that phrase is as subjective as it gets, how could it not be? But as for sequels never being as good as the originals? What about Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Die Hard with A Vengeance, Hot Shots Part Deux, Blade 2, Empire Strikes Back, Shrek 2, Desperado, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Revenge of the Sith (Don’t give me that look), Spider-man 2, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn, Superman II, Back to the Future Part II, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior or X-Men 2. We can probably agree that each of those are superior to their predecessors or at least on par with them.

But of course those are only a few, and a debatable few at that. But still proof that it can be done, it just majorly sucks that not many people took notice of how a good sequel is made, and more of how much money they brought in. Foul play indeed I think we can all agree. But saying that, we still shouldn’t be surprised (trust me I’m especially not trying to put myself on a pedestal here, I am as guilty of bitching about sequels and money grubbing studios as the next person), last time I checked the whole point of Hollywood was to make money wasn’t it? That’s why Film Studios have marketing divisions and accountants isn’t it?

In fact going back to Disney, people are annoyed that they’re going to be franchising Frozen right? Well why are we angry at that and not the Marvel Franchise? That’s one of the biggest franchises out there at the moment yet when Captain America 3 or Guardians of the Galaxy 2 gets announces nobody says a thing. Well that’s because the Marvel Franchise is praised as unanimously good of course. But so is Frozen, at the very least people thought it was good when they saw it, that’s half the reason it was so well received (aside from all the money it made of course).

In fact if you are so sick of a certain franchise, why not just stop giving it your attention? Turn the radio station over next time you hear Let It Go or turn it off altogether, this is sadly more difficult for parents since their kids are the target audience, sorry parents everywhere.

So when a large studio decides to make money off something popular we collectively smack our foreheads and bemoan it. Yet when they’re in the midst of franchising the shit out of something else that’s very popular…we all clam up? I guess I’m just yelling at a larger beast here, after all I’m just one person with a keyboard, hardly going to make a difference right?

I wish we would stop committing the above offence. Sequels and franchising are not inherently bad, it’s their execution that can be viewed as bad. But hey, this is all amazingly subjective and I’m sure a lot of people disagree with me on this. Do you disagree? If so I’d love to hear how. (Politely, mind you this isn’t YouTube.)

The best summation I can give is this, if you don’t like the look of something, be it a sequel, remake or whatever, just don’t give it your time of day, you’ve undoubtedly got better things to be doing.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

~RattlinMan

AMD has just released the Catalyst 15.9.1 beta driver update after the 15.9 update on Tuesday resulted in reports from users of memory leaks that resulted when certain windows were altered.

The update came with optimisations for the Star Wars Battlefront beta and Fable Legends’ DirectX 12 benchmark, but when some users resized windows or snapped certain windows, it caused a memory leak that would cause all the video memory of the graphic card to be used. Upon becoming aware of the issue AMD issued a statement that urged everyone affected to roll back their driver versions.

The 15.9.1 beta driver update has fixed the issue, so if you’ve got 15.9 update as soon as possible to stop the memory leak problems. The beta driver update comes with the same optimisations for tar Wars Battlefront beta and Fable Legends, as well as a DirectX Diagnostics bug fix. Other bug fixes included crashes and signal loss on some BenQ FreeSync monitors, and an issue with Catalyst Control Center that made it impossible to download any updates from within the software.

Twitch is the biggest name in game streaming right now, with many contenders coming and falling. Now however it has some serious competition in the shape of Youtube Gaming and it seems to have made them sit up and take notice of their own faults.

Today at the first TwitchCon event, Twitch announced that a handful of new features were coming to the streaming platform early next year and the two biggest changes of note seem to be an attempt to compete with Youtube invading ‘their’ space. Most importantly of the two; Twitch will soon let you host video uploads without streaming it live first.

The video uploads means that you can record yourself playing a game and edit it into a cutdown format, before uploading it onto Twitch who will host the video for you and allow you to customise its thumbnail, description and tags as well as letting you put a bunch into a playlist. Stop me if this sounds in any way familiar. It’s a far cry from the Twitch that set expiry dates on the hosting of VoDs of your past livestreams.

However the other big thing is that Twitch are finally following the curve and are updating their video player to finally rid it entirely of Flash. Many other video sites, including Youtube, have already ditched Flash in favour of HTML5 and Twitch has already made a partial step in theirs being part-Flash, part-HTML5. This does tax computers though so the update will be welcomed by many, myself being one of them.

Other features will include things like a dedicated Playstation app coming at the same time and improved whisper functionality as well as many other smaller tweaks and fixes that will hopefully allow Twitch to just run smoother. Popular and wide-used it might be, but everyone who has used Twitch as a streamer or viewer knows that it could do with some improvement and it seems like we might finally be getting some at last. That’s good.

Shame there’s nothing you can do to patch out trolls in the Twitch Chat.

Today Sony took to the stage at EGX 2015 to talk about the advancements they have made with their own Playstation VR system.

Like Valve’s similar panel yesterday they started off with a little history, tracing the roots of their Morpheus headset way back to the Sony Glasstron headset which was released to markets almost 20 years ago with little LCD screens and a limited frame of view. More recently we’ve had the Eyetoy and Playstation Move controller that laid framework for what Playstation VR is now.

With the Playstation 4, Sony feel they finally have enough computing power in a machine to push the high-grade experience of Playstation VR they want – teaming up the Morpheus headset with the Playstation Move controllers or the Dualshock 4 as well as the Playstation Camera to form an entire experience package to allow for placement in the world as well as being able to interact within it.

Sony felt that triggering natural responses to the situation simulated was the big aim of successful VR and to that effect showed off some of their pre-built experiences – one called The Deep that had participants in a diving cage viewing beautiful fish and an angry shark, as well as a series of them collectively entitled “The London Heist” in which character interaction, virtual object manipulation and then finally both at once in a high-octane situation were simulated for the player. They were adamant that The London Heist was not just a demo of VR or made as a ‘proof-of-concept’, they went through and made it as they would any other triple A game to make it as enjoyable as possible to sell people on the idea that VR could work and work well. Already they say third-party studios have had a “hugely positive” response to the package.

They have also said that right now they’re putting huge consideration onto the limited space people will have to play within their own homes and that they have been working with their designers to make sure that the headset will be comfortable for those players who wear glasses to use for longer periods of time. They also say that since playing a VR game is controlled in such a natural manner for us that VR could be the thing to remove the entry barrier for those people new to gaming.

Unfortunately though the panel didn’t bring any details about when we can expect to see the headset device released or what price we can be expecting; as well as our being told that because virtual reality gaming is such a different concept to the traditional gaming now in order to be backwards compatible games would need to essentially go through re-development.

In terms of the presentation as a whole though, Sony did make virtual reality seem like a fun, entertaining and over all very interesting new step in the world of gaming. Showing off the gameplay and how it worked did a lot more for me then just hearing someone talking about the specs of the hardware would have.